The relative difficulty of data entry in mobile or portable devices that have relatively small, inconvenient or otherwise difficult to use input mechanisms (e.g., small keyboards or keypads, or no keypads at all), and/or in devices that are frequently used in environments where the user's hands and/or attention may be occupied or distracted in performing one or more simultaneous tasks, have rendered alternative techniques that supplement or supplant conventional data entry techniques increasingly important and desirable. Speech input coupled with speech recognition, in particular, provides a convenient mode of user input in circumstances where conventional input functionality may be limited, and/or a user's hands and/or attention may be busy, occupied or otherwise distracted. However, speech recognition techniques may be error prone, often resulting in entered data that contain mistakes that may need to be corrected by the user, and/or resulting in data in need of review and editing.
Conventional data entry systems using standard and/or alternative data entry techniques may also provide ineffective and/or inconvenient support for review, error detection and/or error correction (i.e., proofing). For example, conventional approaches to proofing may rely on a user to review entered data, identify errors, and manually correct them. This user-centric approach may place significant demands on the user because the user often must carefully examine the produced text for the presence of errors and expend effort to enter corrections. Having to do so may be distracting to the user who typically must focus attention on proofing and away from other activity and/or must perform editing using inconvenient or limited input devices.
In environments in which data entry is performed concurrent with other activities, or as a secondary task, such an approach may simply be impractical. For instance, in “eyes-busy” environments such as when a user is driving a car, the user's performance on the primary task of driving may be significantly impaired if, in addition to driving, the user were to attempt to proof (i.e., review and/or correct) entered data using conventional proofing techniques. In other situations where the user's attention is (or should be) primarily focused on other activities, conventional data entry and/or proofing may be problematic, and in some cases potentially dangerous. Even under circumstances where a user can devote sufficient or full attention to data-entry and proofing, conventional techniques for doing so may be unnecessarily burdensome on the user (e.g., in circumstances where the data entry device has limited or restrictive input and/or output capabilities).